I was a former senior manager at KPMG and since 1994 the owner of the Marks Group PC, a 10 person customer relationship management consulting firm based outside Philadelphia. I've written six small-business management books, most recently "The Manufacturer's Book of List" and “In God We Trust, Everyone Else Pays Cash: Simple Lessons From Smart Business People.” Besides Forbes, I daily for The Washington Post and weekly for Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and the Huffington Post monthly for Philadelphia Magazine. I am an unpaid contributor to Forbes. I make no compensation from the number of people who read what I write here. Follow me on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In.

What Would You Do With $25K In Advertising Money?

What if someone were to give you $25,000 to spend on advertising? I ask this because U.S. Cellular, recently announced a contest where one small business will receive this much in free advertising as well as other goodies from the company, like

cash, devices and mobile services. I do work for U.S. Cellular and because they are a client, I’m unfortunately not allowed to enter this contest. But even so, I thought about it and wondered about the money. What would I do with the money?

I run a ten person firm that sells sales, marketing and customer relationship management technologies. Like most small businesses, we don’t advertise. Because we’ve been around for almost twenty years, have about 600 clients and operate near Philadelphia (a city where there is no more than three or four degrees of separation between anyone) we manage to get our work primarily through referrals. Clients, vendors and partners introduce us to people and these people turn into projects.

That doesn’t mean we don’t do lots of marketing too. Because we do. Thanks to technology, small companies like mine have plenty of inexpensive resources to help us do our marketing. There’s a proliferation of e-mail services to help us send out newsletters and campaigns. There are inexpensive online mailing houses where we can send out postcards to our prospect lists for under a buck a piece, including postage. We can outsource our telemarketing to someone on the other side of the country. We can even take advantage of new technologies for sending out mass voicemails, text messages and video-grams. And there are plenty of great services that can track our inbound and outbound marketing efforts, create campaigns, alert us when a visitor is trolling our website and give statistics about our site’s activity.

But what about good old advertising? Should I be spending money here? What would I do if I had $25,000 to spend? What would you do? If you’re like most small business owners, I think your best bet would be to advertise online.

For example, I could spend the money on search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re like me then I’m sure you’re always worried about where the work is going to come from and how to generate more leads. And I’m sure you feel that you’re not leveraging the Internet nearly as much as you should. You know that not enough people are visiting your website. You know there’s a whole world of potential customers out there that are not finding you when they search GoogleGoogle. Every small business client I talk to, like me, feels that we’re not doing our SEO very well. I want any prospect who happens to be searching for things like “CRM”, “sales automation” or “customer database” software to immediately see my website at the top of the list. That’s not happening now. That’s because my SEO is terrible. I could (and should) be spending money there.

Or, I could spend the money on online ads to attract more customers to my website. I realize that I don’t sell anything online, but that’s still OK. We offer lots of webinars, seminars, newsletters and whitepapers to download where I can get the opt-in contact information from visitors for further follow-up. I could more fully utilize AdWords on search engines like Google and Yahoo. I could enroll in affiliate marketing programs from Amazon, ClickBank and others to drive more volume. I could create better display ads to garner more attention for my company and our products. I could to seek to better emphasize our brand on social media sites like FacebookFacebook as well.

I could also spend on mobile advertising. Because there are now hundreds of millions of mobile users in this country alone. They are tweeting, Facebooking and YouTubing. They’re also visiting check-in and review sites like YelpYelp and Foursquare, getting directions from HopStop, checking scores on ESPNESPN and uploading photos to Flickr. That’s lots of eyeballs doing lots of activities. And many of them could be my customers. Like most small companies, I am doing almost nothing by way of advertising on these sites and I’m missing out on their explosive growth.

So problem solved, right? It’s online. It’s AdWords and SEO and mobile. That’s the answer for small businesses that want to advertise, right? If only it were that easy. If it were that easy then we’d all be doing it. But we’re not. That’s because like all problems facing business owners, advertising today requires a lot of two things: money and time.

Even if you won that $25K from U.S. Cellular you’d only be making a down-payment on your advertising. You’re not going to give that money to an SEO consultant and have all your problems solved. Sure, you might find your website listed on Google’s front page …for about a minute. But good search engine optimization is a long term affair. It’s a constantly changing environment. You’ll need to employ a person, or an outside firm, to continuously evolve your keywords, meta-tags, landing pages and links among other activities. AdWords can be expensive too. It all centers around clicks, impressions, views and other metrics based on the search terms you choose that, if chosen unwisely, could easily break your budget with little return on investment in no time. Creating, updating, and launching mini-display ads to appear on mobile devices is just one part of the cost of getting your company noticed that way. Like all other advertising you have to do this again and again and again for people to remember you. All of these options require a long term commitment and lots of money – likely way more than $25,000.

And there’s time too, of course. Because no small owner is an expert at this stuff. I’m selling software. My clients are shipping custom flooring materials, putting up drywall, cutting hedges, designing houses and doing blood tests. Being an expert at search engine and mobile marketing is a full time job. That’s not our job. But if we don’t want to throw away our money we still need to get very educated on the ins and outs of this stuff. And we’ll have to hire and supervise consultants and professionals too. All of this takes time. Time that we don’t have. So many of us don’t do it.

So what would you do with the $25K in advertising money? Spend it online. But consider it a long term investment. And a drop in the bucket. Those who do invest the right amount of time and money, along with the discipline to make their investment pay off, will succeed with today’s advertising technologies. But isn’t this the same for everything we do?

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